The intention of the following examples is to give hints of what can be achieved, and inspire you to further investigations of the Spotfire features to get the dashboards you want.
Turning off filtering in a visualization
A typical interaction in a dashboard is filtering the data. By default, any filtering you do affects all visualizations on the page, if they are based on the same data table. There might be times, though, when you want a visualization to stay unaffected of the filtering, for example, if you want to use it as a reference. Then you can turn off the filtering for that particular visualization.
Simply go to the Properties for the visualization, the Data page. Under Limit data using filterings, clear all check boxes.
Example
The bar charts below are based on the following simple data table.
The total sales for all the regions is displayed in the left bar chart, and in the bar chart to the right, the sales for the region that has been selected in the filter is shown. That is, you can view the entire sales and the sales in a specific part at the same time.
This is because the filtering is turned off for the left bar chart by clearing the Limit data using filterings check boxes in the Properties, the Data page.
Another alternative to compare all data to filtered data is the use of Subsets.
Making text dynamic
The images below are excerpts from the example in the Dashboards topic. Note that not only the numbers are changed when interacting with the dashboard; the top text to the right reflects what is currently selected in the Region filter.
How this is done is described below.
In the left text area, a filter control has been added that lets the user select a region, and then demographic data for that region is displayed in the text area to the right. To update the text to show the region that is currently selected, a dynamic item is used:
Right-click the text area and select Edit Text Area.
Click Insert Dynamic Item, and select Calculated Value.
The Calculated value Settings dialog is displayed.
Select Values.
Right-click the Calculate values using selector, and select Custom Expression.
The Custom Expression dialog is displayed.
Enter the expression:
case UniqueCount([Region])
when 0 then "None"when 1 then First([Region])
else "All countries"end
Close the Custom Expression and Calculated value Settings dialogs.
In the Edit Text Area dialog, click the Save button.
The dynamic Calculated value item displays the evaluation of the expression. If a region is selected in the filter control, the name of that region is displayed, and if the (All) option is selected, the result is All countries, respectively.
See also:
Useful Features when Designing Dashboards